In 2015 Professor Charlotte Villiers, Dr Georgina Tsagas and Professor Beate Sjåfjell organised a conference together with Professor Lina Papadopoulou, Jean Monnet Chair for European Constitutional Law and Culture at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. This interdisciplinary conference, entitled ‘Stimulating business in a Europe in crisis: Evolving trends and the case of Greece’ was held in Thessaloniki, Greece, at the Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
Inspired by the insightful presentations and thought-provoking discussions, Charlotte Villiers and Georgina Tsagas (both then at University of Bristol) and Beate Sjåfjell (University of Oslo) started planning an edited volume on the topic. These plans have gradually come to fruition, and the manuscript for the edited volume ‘Sustainable Value Creation in the EU: Towards Pathways to a Sustainable Future through Crises’, edited by Beate Sjåfjell, Georgina Tsagas and Charlotte Villiers, has now been submitted to Cambridge University Press.
Professor Takis Tridimas, who gave a keynote presentation at the 2015 conference, has written the foreword to the volume and highlights the volume’s critique of ‘the EU’s model of value creation and [its] call for greater emphasis on sustainability’. Professor Tridimas identifies that a premise that underpins this book is that, ‘although the EU offers an admirable value system and has made a major contribution to the well-being of the peoples of Europe, it has not achieved its full potential owing to the lack of commitment by the Member States’ and goes on to say that the contributions of the volume ‘address value creation in the EU by challenging what the authors perceive to be an eschewed conception of it and proposing its readjustment in the interests of social fairness and sustainability’. He concludes by saying that the ‘book brings to the fore some important themes, critiques prevailing policy models, and proposes solutions. The analysis is rigorous, relevant and original. It thus makes a very valuable contribution to the narrative debate and the conceptualisation of the integration model’.
The volume draws on a range of perspectives including from the now concluded SMART Project (2016-2020). As a teaser, the introductory chapter as well as abstracts of all chapters are freely available on SSRN.
Chapter 1: Stimulating Value Creation in a Europe in Crisis
By Charlotte Villiers, Beate Sjåfjell and Georgina Tsagas
Chapter 2: Ten Million or One Hundred Million Casualties? COVID-19 Crisis and Europe's Sustainability Agenda
By Dirk A. Zetsche and Roberta Consiglio
Chapter 3: The Corporation and the EU Social Market Economy: A renewed commitment
By Irene Lynch Fannon and Michael James Boland
Chapter 4: Fiscal austerity and monetary largesse: the EU’s constitutional and ideological straitjacket
By Andrew Johnston and Trevor Pugh
Chapter 5: Sustainability and Eurozone 2.0: Still Impossible?
By Alexandros Kyriakidis
Chapter 6: The Economic Adjustment Program of Greece (2010-18): Why Failure?
By Panagiotis Liargovas and Voula Kratimenou
Chapter 7: Shareholder Activism: Driver or Obstacle for Sustainable Value Creation?
By Jukka Mähönen
Chapter 8: Financing Sustainable Value Creation
By Jay Cullen, Jukka Mähönen and Heidi Rapp Nilsen
Chapter 9: Integrating Sustainable Value Creation in Corporate Governance: Company Law, Corporate Governance Codes and the Constitution of the Company
By Beate Sjåfjell and Georgina Tsagas
Chapter 10: The Contribution of Social Enterprises to Value Creation in Europe: The case of Dopper BV in the Netherlands
By Tineke Lambooy, Henk Kievit, Aikaterini Argyrou, Robert Jan Blomme and Olivera Vuletic
Chapter 11: The Role of Women in Stimulating New Types of Value
By Charlotte Villiers and Roseanne Russell
Chapter 12: Pathways Towards Sustainable Value Creation in the EU
By Charlotte Villiers, Beate Sjåfjell and Georgina Tsagas